Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the
Speaker 1: Internet was just this open space and we could try
Speaker 1: all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell
Speaker 1: his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and
Speaker 1: then people realize that people are ripping each other off
Speaker 1: on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service,
Speaker 1: and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen,
Speaker 1: and they happen really really fast. I want us to
Speaker 1: get back to that moment of thinking things are possible.
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Speaker 2: He's also something of an Internet activist, and.
Speaker 1: I work on a whole lot of projects trying to
Speaker 1: make the Internet a better place, which I still believe
Speaker 1: can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 2: You know what, you may be one of the last
Speaker 2: soldiers standing on that battlefield.
Speaker 1: I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely
Speaker 1: place to be. But you know, the great thing about
Speaker 1: being a professor is that I can try to win
Speaker 1: over students to the cause, and every so often, you know,
Speaker 1: we get a win. Every so often. People are excited
Speaker 1: about this idea that things actually can change, and I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it just hass to do with
Speaker 1: reframing our thinking.
Speaker 2: Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever
Speaker 2: spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age,
Speaker 2: I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might
Speaker 2: have made you mad, It might have made you money,
Speaker 2: it might have done both at the same time. The second,
Speaker 2: Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he
Speaker 2: sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what
Speaker 2: he has to say, you might want him to win
Speaker 2: from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm
Speaker 2: Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye.
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we
Speaker 2: could talk about how he would do that, we need
Speaker 2: to understand how we got here. We've talked about this
Speaker 2: here before on the show, but early on the Internet
Speaker 2: was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it.
Speaker 2: If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely
Speaker 2: check that one out too. So Ethan started his career
Speaker 2: during those early dot com days. He was one of
Speaker 2: the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod
Speaker 2: was most well known for being a place where you
Speaker 2: could build your own homepage, which back then was a
Speaker 2: really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping
Speaker 2: up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But
Speaker 2: in order to do that, they needed money, and so
Speaker 2: they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep,
Speaker 2: that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here,
Speaker 2: but I remember.
Speaker 1: We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading
Speaker 1: competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that
Speaker 1: against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit
Speaker 1: of a you know, you did just a little bit
Speaker 1: of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about.
Speaker 2: God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
Speaker 1: I'm just fair enough. That's where I went.
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, as I was entering this
Speaker 2: phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things,
Speaker 2: and I would like to make things too. Very early
Speaker 2: in that stage, I realized that that was always going
Speaker 2: to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did,
Speaker 2: or on top of whatever I did, or inside of
Speaker 2: whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you what's going on a tripod.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast.
Speaker 1: We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other,
Speaker 1: we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But
Speaker 1: we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service.
Speaker 1: We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you
Speaker 1: can get extra space, you can get premium customer service.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts,
Speaker 1: we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to
Speaker 1: identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're
Speaker 1: going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have
Speaker 1: sponsors who are like these are probably high school and
Speaker 1: college students. You know what high school and college students
Speaker 1: really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on
Speaker 1: and says, we want to sponsor people to go and
Speaker 1: get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us
Speaker 1: dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at
Speaker 1: the same time and at a certain point, if you're
Speaker 1: trying something new, if you're trying a different business model,
Speaker 1: your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the
Speaker 1: investors want to hear is how many page views are
Speaker 1: you getting a month and how fast is it growing?
Speaker 1: And because we have eighteen million people like you who
Speaker 1: put home pages on the site, we are getting the
Speaker 1: eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing
Speaker 1: something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo
Speaker 1: are coming and knocking on our door and saying we
Speaker 1: would like to do some business. We are like, you know,
Speaker 1: kids in our twenties in the top floor of a
Speaker 1: plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from
Speaker 1: Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: advertising is the way to go.
Speaker 2: So advertising is the way to go might not be
Speaker 2: the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work,
Speaker 2: and it also made some pretty interesting things possible.
Speaker 1: The other thing it's an amazing model for is for
Speaker 1: people who are unbanked, who are not part of the
Speaker 1: mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts
Speaker 1: of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably
Speaker 1: did not know when you were fooling around with that
Speaker 1: Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users
Speaker 1: was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at
Speaker 1: that point was most of the political opposition was using
Speaker 1: Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the
Speaker 1: Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able
Speaker 1: to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set
Speaker 1: up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have
Speaker 1: credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising
Speaker 1: is a great way to help out people who are
Speaker 1: coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for
Speaker 2: supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They
Speaker 2: were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing.
Speaker 1: Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM,
Speaker 1: and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough,
Speaker 1: is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out
Speaker 1: of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you
Speaker 1: want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're
Speaker 1: basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know,
Speaker 1: we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the
Speaker 1: cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page.
Speaker 1: And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go,
Speaker 1: we are so much better than that page. And Wired
Speaker 1: you can click on our ad and it will take
Speaker 1: you to your website and people might spend hours with you,
Speaker 1: not just that moment on the page, and you can
Speaker 1: take their name and address. So we are worth so
Speaker 1: much more than that magazine ad. So we start out
Speaker 1: pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging
Speaker 1: like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people
Speaker 1: realize that there's ads all.
Speaker 2: Over the web.
Speaker 1: You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory,
Speaker 1: and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per
Speaker 1: thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's
Speaker 1: affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the
Speaker 1: ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and
Speaker 1: so then it moves to cost per click, and that's
Speaker 1: an entirely different space. In the course of five years,
Speaker 1: we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for
Speaker 1: a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will
Speaker 1: pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect
Speaker 1: depending on what the ad is.
Speaker 2: And you know where this goes. Ads not only became
Speaker 2: an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the
Speaker 2: metric of success, you have to start listening to what
Speaker 2: the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan.
Speaker 2: He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom.
Speaker 2: He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to
Speaker 2: keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites.
Speaker 2: He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad.
Speaker 2: To be clear, he regrets that he did this the
Speaker 2: innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it
Speaker 2: an innovation.
Speaker 1: I think I'm not going to let you get away
Speaker 1: with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term,
Speaker 1: a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists,
Speaker 1: although thank god, not as much as it used to.
Speaker 1: So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's
Speaker 1: go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing
Speaker 1: number of user homepages. They have become the center of
Speaker 1: our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like
Speaker 1: a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend
Speaker 1: Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up
Speaker 1: a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when
Speaker 1: our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it
Speaker 1: is the most popular thing on our site. So it's
Speaker 1: completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident.
Speaker 1: But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands
Speaker 1: that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He
Speaker 1: understands that this is where our growth is coming from.
Speaker 1: And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And
Speaker 1: we've got ad execs going out and they are showing
Speaker 1: random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads
Speaker 1: are showing up on content that the advertisers do not
Speaker 1: want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography.
Speaker 1: It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the
Speaker 1: Internet has been an if he placed going back into
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look,
Speaker 1: we got to run ads against the homepages. But as
Speaker 1: long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser
Speaker 1: feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And
Speaker 1: I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel.
Speaker 1: It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it,
Speaker 1: It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and
Speaker 1: so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's
Speaker 1: some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way,
Speaker 1: an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear
Speaker 1: that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is
Speaker 1: your space.
Speaker 2: So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem.
Speaker 2: Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory,
Speaker 2: and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by
Speaker 2: creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out.
Speaker 1: It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript,
Speaker 1: we insert it into every one of the homepages that's
Speaker 1: out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort
Speaker 1: of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there
Speaker 1: this extra weird window here, But we don't get a
Speaker 1: ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code,
Speaker 1: they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my
Speaker 1: polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they
Speaker 1: turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred
Speaker 1: pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just
Speaker 1: an AD. So I do the first pop up, and
Speaker 1: it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning
Speaker 1: up to it. But it was trying to be maybe
Speaker 1: a bit more than that. The essence of it gets
Speaker 1: stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's
Speaker 1: off to the races, right like then people are doing
Speaker 1: these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized,
Speaker 1: so on and so forth, and you have really the
Speaker 1: scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet.
Speaker 1: And let me just say just to be clear on this.
Speaker 1: When we were talking before this interview, I told you
Speaker 1: I did not want to do an interview on pop
Speaker 1: up ads. And part of it is that it's a
Speaker 1: little too easy. It's a little like you know, look,
Speaker 1: it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation.
Speaker 1: Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail.
Speaker 1: Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats.
Speaker 1: I have a relationship with my local police department in
Speaker 1: this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not
Speaker 1: to call a swap team to my residence because almost
Speaker 1: every time I do an interview on pop ups that
Speaker 1: gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So
Speaker 1: it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building
Speaker 1: the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to
Speaker 1: building the pop up and talking about it as a problem.
Speaker 2: Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is.
Speaker 2: Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing
Speaker 2: because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like,
Speaker 2: are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in
Speaker 2: the living room?
Speaker 1: Yell?
Speaker 2: Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop
Speaker 2: ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come
Speaker 2: back to that later, but the industry has long since
Speaker 2: moved on to something that has zero to do with
Speaker 2: what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought
Speaker 2: of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is
Speaker 2: the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back,
Speaker 2: and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was
Speaker 2: that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that
Speaker 2: they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user.
Speaker 2: But the industry figured out how to make those ads
Speaker 2: much more relevant to you by watching everything you do
Speaker 2: on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking
Speaker 2: a little differently.
Speaker 1: The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that
Speaker 1: the people who have been trying to make money out
Speaker 1: of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of
Speaker 1: information to the equation. They want to know where you are,
Speaker 1: They want to know where else on the Internet that
Speaker 1: you've been, They want to know what you've done, what
Speaker 1: you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet,
Speaker 1: this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and
Speaker 1: I started looking at this and saying, what if you
Speaker 1: could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so
Speaker 1: much less of the surveillance.
Speaker 2: Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights
Speaker 2: on the Internet without having to sell out your audience.
Speaker 2: That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how
Speaker 2: the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in
Speaker 2: service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and
Speaker 2: he started to think, could we do anything about this?
Speaker 1: My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just
Speaker 1: end advertising?
Speaker 3: Right? Like?
Speaker 1: Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be
Speaker 1: a fantastic model for a product or service that you
Speaker 1: don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So
Speaker 1: imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in
Speaker 1: Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the
Speaker 1: way local media is working. I'm going to create a
Speaker 1: new news product. It's going to be video first, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put
Speaker 1: up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see
Speaker 1: how it's going first, and under the let me see
Speaker 1: how it's going first. Advertising is a great model.
Speaker 2: Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet
Speaker 2: could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the
Speaker 2: content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has
Speaker 2: to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan
Speaker 2: and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If
Speaker 2: ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're
Speaker 2: crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow
Speaker 2: more ethical.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to get very personal about this for
Speaker 1: a moment, because it's the example that we actually use
Speaker 1: in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine
Speaker 1: years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I
Speaker 1: drank all and I was one of those drinkers where
Speaker 1: it was like part of my personality, Like I collected
Speaker 1: scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and
Speaker 1: so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as
Speaker 1: a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves
Speaker 1: advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying
Speaker 1: to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon.
Speaker 1: I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that
Speaker 1: other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off
Speaker 1: into the future. What we end up saying is that
Speaker 1: you do have a right to be forgotten, not in
Speaker 1: the sense of like you have a right necessarily be
Speaker 1: scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to
Speaker 1: change your mind. And so what we end up proposing
Speaker 1: is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can
Speaker 1: know anything about me in this one session. You can
Speaker 1: look at the different pages that I go to on
Speaker 1: the website. You can look at the time, you can
Speaker 1: look at the date, you can look at the location,
Speaker 1: you can look at what I'm searching for. You can
Speaker 1: look at the context of those pages and use that
Speaker 1: to target an ad. What you cannot do is look
Speaker 1: at what I was looking at a month ago, a
Speaker 1: year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more
Speaker 1: ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting
Speaker 1: that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some
Speaker 1: percentage of people who are willing to pay the money
Speaker 1: to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know,
Speaker 1: for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so
Speaker 1: what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites
Speaker 1: that are willing to say we're going to do this.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian,
Speaker 1: the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on
Speaker 1: online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden,
Speaker 1: and I end up in a session with the publisher there,
Speaker 1: Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these
Speaker 1: stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that
Speaker 1: are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on
Speaker 1: the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid
Speaker 1: of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and
Speaker 1: there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that,
Speaker 1: Like it feels like if you're going to be The
Speaker 1: Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I
Speaker 1: might opt out of this form of advertising and into
Speaker 1: a more ethical form of advertising.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing
Speaker 2: you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you
Speaker 2: that those are not.
Speaker 1: Where it's the go together very often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last
Speaker 2: time somebody said that to me.
Speaker 1: Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's
Speaker 1: go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the
Speaker 1: middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking,
Speaker 1: because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and
Speaker 1: I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call,
Speaker 1: and they want my phone call because so I call
Speaker 1: them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to
Speaker 1: make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That
Speaker 1: ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks
Speaker 1: in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click,
Speaker 1: and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man,
Speaker 1: here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to
Speaker 1: go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is
Speaker 1: advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service,
Speaker 1: someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in
Speaker 1: the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is
Speaker 1: aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is
Speaker 1: a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need.
Speaker 2: In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague
Speaker 2: talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure.
Speaker 2: So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad
Speaker 2: Sense might just started out as little tools that could
Speaker 2: help you talk to your college friends or maybe help
Speaker 2: you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to
Speaker 2: sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There
Speaker 2: really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only
Speaker 2: way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles
Speaker 2: was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you
Speaker 2: can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take
Speaker 2: a train, You can only take that expensive toll road.
Speaker 2: There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again,
Speaker 2: they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense,
Speaker 2: They're just building another option for people who prefer something,
Speaker 2: as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work
Speaker 2: on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea,
Speaker 2: and believe it or not, it kind of goes back
Speaker 2: to that hack that he's most famous for.
Speaker 1: Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in
Speaker 1: certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you
Speaker 1: and your browser, you are probably not seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of pop up ads these stays. And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons behind that. The first one is that every
Speaker 1: modern web browser has a feature to allow you to
Speaker 1: block pop up ads, and that is the simplest example
Speaker 1: of middleware that we know of. So middleware is software
Speaker 1: that you, as a user can install on your web
Speaker 1: browser or potentially on your phone to give you more
Speaker 1: control over a service. So the classic piece of middleware
Speaker 1: is a pop up blocker, which is, hey, this site
Speaker 1: wants to open a window. You can choose not to
Speaker 1: have that opened if you prefer. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: it actually shows us that things can get better. We're
Speaker 1: not so much drowning and pop ups. We're now drowning
Speaker 1: and other stuff. We're drowning in video AutoPlay ads. Sites
Speaker 1: like Facebook work very actively to disable ad blockers, but
Speaker 1: pop ups and ads in general were really the first
Speaker 1: time that users were sort of like, you know what,
Speaker 1: we actually need some more control in this situation. So
Speaker 1: let's start building the software that gives us increasing amounts
Speaker 1: of control.
Speaker 2: And even once you use this concept of middleware to
Speaker 2: fix social media, we'll explain how after the break. So
Speaker 2: I just want to read back to you a headline
Speaker 2: of an article that you wrote in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: The headline reads, I love Facebook. That's why I'm suing Meta. Yeah, either,
Speaker 2: please explain this to me. I guess I can come
Speaker 2: across as kind of aggressive every so often.
Speaker 1: So I'm a Facebook user. I use it pretty much
Speaker 1: every day. I got married thanks to Facebook. Tenish years ago.
Speaker 1: I was divorced. I reconnected with a college friend of mine.
Speaker 1: She was living in Houston, Texas. I was out in
Speaker 1: western Massachusetts. But I looked her up on Facebook and
Speaker 1: we started chatting and I invited her to talk that
Speaker 1: I was giving down at Rice University. Seven years later,
Speaker 1: we're married. So thank you Facebook. You know, I appreciate that,
Speaker 1: and I think as far as keeping people loosely in
Speaker 1: touch with one another, particularly you know, for me as
Speaker 1: a gen xer, it's actually been an incredible tool. However, Comma,
Speaker 1: like everything else, it is becoming more and more algorithmically driven.
Speaker 1: And these days on Facebook, I am a lot less
Speaker 1: likely to be seeing updates from my friends about their kids.
Speaker 1: I instead get a lot of reels just trying to
Speaker 1: capture as much of my attention as possible. And so
Speaker 1: I got really interested in this idea that maybe I
Speaker 1: could have more control over Facebook. Friend of mine in
Speaker 1: the UK, guy named Louis Barclay, wrote a piece of
Speaker 1: software called unfollow everything. It did something super simple. It
Speaker 1: went into Facebook. It kept your whole friend's graph. It
Speaker 1: just said I'm going to unfollow all of them, and
Speaker 1: eventually what you end up with is an empty feed.
Speaker 1: You just don't have anyone that you're following anymore. People
Speaker 1: liked it, Louie liked it, other people started using it,
Speaker 1: and Facebook said, Louis, you got to take this down
Speaker 1: otherwise we're going to come after you and you court.
Speaker 1: And by the way, that long click rap agreement that
Speaker 1: you signed onto makes you responsible for our legal fees.
Speaker 1: So what Facebook's contract in the UK says that if
Speaker 1: you lose litigation against them, you are responsible for the
Speaker 1: legal fees incurred by Facebook. Wow. So Louis looks at
Speaker 1: this and says, yeah, I'm not taking that gamble. I
Speaker 1: could be financially ruined. But he goes to a group
Speaker 1: called the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and
Speaker 1: they say, what if we tried to do this again
Speaker 1: in the United States? And I said, you know, I
Speaker 1: love this idea because this is an example of middleware.
Speaker 1: So Night First Amendments that comes to me and says,
Speaker 1: do you want to try to put this in front
Speaker 1: of a federal court, and the idea is, I will
Speaker 1: put together an experiment. The experiment is we will recruit
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of users, they will try using an
Speaker 1: updated version of unfollow Everything, and they will let us
Speaker 1: know whether they like that experience, and we will study
Speaker 1: whether it changes how much they use Facebook. We then
Speaker 1: brought it to a federal court and said, hey, we
Speaker 1: want to do this. The last time someone did this,
Speaker 1: Facebook came down on them like a ton of bricks.
Speaker 1: Before we invest our time and money on this, we'd
Speaker 1: like a ruling that this is legal. The federal court said, nice,
Speaker 1: tryprof You're asking us to rule on something that hasn't
Speaker 1: happened yet. That's not how the US court system works.
Speaker 1: Build something and we'll let you know what happens. So
Speaker 1: I have now been in the process of trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to build what my friend Louie built.
Speaker 1: The trick is in the couple of years since Louie
Speaker 1: built that software, Facebook has put a lot of people
Speaker 1: working on making middlewhere impossible. Specifically, the middleware that they
Speaker 1: care about is ad blockers, and they have a whole
Speaker 1: team working to make it almost impossible to block ads.
Speaker 1: On Facebook, and the same techniques that I need to
Speaker 1: use to do and follow everything are the same techniques
Speaker 1: that ad blockers use. So we're still very much engaged
Speaker 1: in battle. But it's me and a couple of brave
Speaker 1: students that ums Amherst versus Facebook, all of its resources
Speaker 1: and all of its lawyers.
Speaker 2: I don't know too many people who are willing to
Speaker 2: go against Meta like that, but if this thing that
Speaker 2: Ethan is working on comes out, I would try it.
Speaker 2: I mean, this would be the one thing that could
Speaker 2: bring me back to Facebook. But Ethan isn't advocating for
Speaker 2: everyone to just sit back and wait for him to
Speaker 2: swoop in and save the day. There are things that
Speaker 2: you and me can do right now for ourselves. It's
Speaker 2: just going to take some work.
Speaker 1: So the funny thing is you can do things about
Speaker 1: it right So here's a couple of things you can
Speaker 1: do about it. A lot of people have gotten off
Speaker 1: of Twitter because Twitter is now controlled by a right
Speaker 1: wing extremist troll and it is not the community that.
Speaker 3: It used to be.
Speaker 1: When people get off Twitter, they tend to go one
Speaker 1: of two different places, and they actually have both really
Speaker 1: good things to talk about with them. Blue Sky has
Speaker 1: a lot of the functionality that Twitter used to have,
Speaker 1: and it's got some very cool functionality around being able
Speaker 1: to do custom feeds. You can go into Blue Sky
Speaker 1: and you can actually have a lot of control, very
Speaker 1: much like middleware, except that it's actually built into the tool.
Speaker 1: It's built in as a function. People are using their
Speaker 1: ability to do feeds to do very focused collections. There's
Speaker 1: a collection called Black Sky for people who are trying
Speaker 1: to get more color in their Twitter feeds. There are
Speaker 1: people doing it to push women, to push voices from
Speaker 1: the developing world. It's a really exciting set of tools
Speaker 1: and I'm a huge supporter of it. The trick is
Speaker 1: Blue Sky is still run by a corporation. They're subject
Speaker 1: to the laws of capitalism, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: So let me introduce you to mastadon. Mastodon is an
Speaker 1: open source alternative to Twitter. You can run a mast
Speaker 1: it on server on your own server. You probably don't
Speaker 1: want to. It's a decent amount of work, but I
Speaker 1: am part of a group called social dot co Op.
Speaker 1: This is a masked it on server that is run
Speaker 1: as a co op. I pay seventy five bucks a
Speaker 1: year for my membership to it. The leadership of it,
Speaker 1: the people who do moderation. It is elected out of
Speaker 1: the community. People are asked to put in volunteer time
Speaker 1: to take on moderation duties at different points. It is
Speaker 1: a different model for doing this. The trick is these
Speaker 1: models are small. They're getting used by a couple million people,
Speaker 1: not by two billion people. These models don't have ad budgets.
Speaker 1: They're not going out and buying Super Bowl ads. And
Speaker 1: we got to tell the story. We got to get
Speaker 1: on podcasts and tell people that there's another way to
Speaker 1: do this. It doesn't have to suck as bad as
Speaker 1: it does. It really doesn't. So here are three things
Speaker 1: that we can do. We need to force these big
Speaker 1: platforms to allow for middlework. We need to make it
Speaker 1: a law that you can use something to give you
Speaker 1: more control over TikTok or Facebook or something along those lines. Second,
Speaker 1: we would do interoperability, so if you don't want to
Speaker 1: use TikTok's app to see TikTok, you can still get
Speaker 1: the content out of it, but you can do it
Speaker 1: through a browser on your phone that you control. And
Speaker 1: then third, we got to get people psyched about building
Speaker 1: and governing their own online spaces. Right now, social dot
Speaker 1: co op is not a good alternative to Twitter or
Speaker 1: to blue Sky. There just aren't enough people on mastadon.
Speaker 1: But if I have a client on my phone that
Speaker 1: I control and I can merge them all together, Hey,
Speaker 1: let me see what people are talking about on Twitter,
Speaker 1: let me see Facebook, let me see Insta, let me
Speaker 1: see all of it and my own little social network
Speaker 1: at the same place. And I can go in and say,
Speaker 1: you know what, and prioritize my local news and you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm probably not hearing enough from women in
Speaker 1: the global South, So you know, adding a feed like that,
Speaker 1: now I've got my custom feed. It's local, it's prioritizing
Speaker 1: the voices I want to hear, it's incorporating all of
Speaker 1: these things. This is technically possible. We have shown we
Speaker 1: can do it. It is a policy issue, and it
Speaker 1: is a policy issue that's very hard to make progress
Speaker 1: on in the United States because these very powerful platforms
Speaker 1: are run by men who are sitting with Donald Trump
Speaker 1: at his inauguration period. These companies figured out that they
Speaker 1: needed to stay on the right side of the most
Speaker 1: powerful person in the United States right now, so that
Speaker 1: we don't get a better internet.
Speaker 2: What you're talking about is I mean even the phrase
Speaker 2: a better Internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that
Speaker 2: a lot of people's solution is just get off of
Speaker 2: social media. It's really interesting to me that you're actually
Speaker 2: advocating for in some ways basically saving social media for
Speaker 2: people who are trying to leave it.
Speaker 1: Social media is worth saving. I'm a Type one diabetic.
Speaker 1: I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. I've had diabetes since I
Speaker 1: was thirteen years old. I'm fifty three years old. Now
Speaker 1: my body's changing. I'm trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: manage my diabetes, lose way, keep up my running. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that I rely on to do
Speaker 1: this is the t one D community on Reddit, where
Speaker 1: I can come on and say, hey, I go for
Speaker 1: runs in the morning and my blood sugar goes up.
Speaker 1: What's up with that? And someone comes in and says,
Speaker 1: it's called a cortisol dump. Here's the scientific paper on it.
Speaker 1: Find out more about it. That is the Internet that
Speaker 1: I fell in love with in nineteen eighty nine when
Speaker 1: I showed up at my university and discovered that I
Speaker 1: could log onto incredible amounts of information out there. The
Speaker 1: Internet I love is the Internet that I was able
Speaker 1: to turn to and say, hey, I wonder where Amy
Speaker 1: is these days, and reconnect with her and seven years
Speaker 1: later get married. It is the internet where queer and
Speaker 1: trans kids in my community can go online and find
Speaker 1: people who are going through the same experiences that they're
Speaker 1: going through in high school, find out about the summer
Speaker 1: camps that they can go to, and they can bond
Speaker 1: with other trans us. This is what social media should
Speaker 1: be about. Social media doesn't have to be terrible, and
Speaker 1: it is not our fault. It has become terrible because
Speaker 1: some very powerful people with some very good financial motivations
Speaker 1: have figured out how to make money off it being terrible.
Speaker 1: But it will continue to be terrible until we take
Speaker 1: responsibility for it not being terrible.
Speaker 2: I have started to hate social media. I've basically stopped
Speaker 2: using it, which has been pretty good for my mental health,
Speaker 2: but it also means that it's much harder for me
Speaker 2: to stay in tune what my parents or my other
Speaker 2: family members are into. So what if we could just
Speaker 2: plug something into social media and make it a little
Speaker 2: bit better. What if Ethan's middleware project could make you say,
Speaker 2: you know what, I can tolerate Facebook now It's probably
Speaker 2: not the only solution, and it might not be for everyone,
Speaker 2: but I do think that it's an option that, at
Speaker 2: the very least we should be allowed to try. Anyway,
Speaker 2: that's it for this one. And by the way, if
Speaker 2: you like this episode and you want to know more
Speaker 2: about why it is that the Internet got so bad,
Speaker 2: check out my interview with Tim Woo. The link for that,
Speaker 2: plus links to Ethan's work, is in the show notes.
Speaker 2: Thank you again to Ethan for breaking all this down
Speaker 2: for us, and thank you once again for listening to
Speaker 2: another episode at kill Switch. If you want to talk,
Speaker 2: you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
Speaker 2: or on Instagram. We're at kill switchpod. And if you
Speaker 2: dug this one, I think someone else might like it too,
Speaker 2: you could send it to them, or if you're too
Speaker 2: shy to share us with your friends, you could write
Speaker 2: a review. It helps other people find the show, which
Speaker 2: helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted
Speaker 2: by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, dar
Speaker 2: Luck Potts, and Julia Nutter. A theme song is by
Speaker 2: me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
Speaker 2: From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin One Guest
Speaker 2: Shot to Gadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive
Speaker 2: producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Detour. Catch on the
Speaker 2: next one, Goodbye,